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Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

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Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#81

Post by jasode »

rimantas wrote: post #71
jasode wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The web works best as a document platform. This is only true if you constrain the "web" to mean the Tim Berners-Lee document-centric HTML and its http hyperlinks. The "web" also means the whole internet stack, TCPIP, DNS routing, etc. In that case, the web is a foundational tool for anything that connects people or Internet Of Things. To say the "web works best as a document platform" is like saying "the electricity…

No, the web means web. Internet means internet.

Those were the historical and technical divisions.

Because http & https is ubiquitous and they have a defacto pass through most firewalls, the modern "web" is the "internet" as far as application interfaces are concerned.

The idea of a pure separation of concepts such that http is "documents" and some other protocol on some other port is "apps" is not going to happen. All those IT departments' security teams and Cisco admins at Fortune 1000 companies are not going to adjust their firewall rules to open new ports and protocols. The "http port 80" has become the "internet" on top of the old definition of "internet". It's not ideal but that's where we are today.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#82

Post by brudgers »

Sure it's just me anecdotally, but I don't care about native apps versus web apps. I care about where the ship takes me not the arrangement of its deck chairs. I'll use the command line...or the address/search box...if it gets me what I want. Good user interaction and great functionality subsume widget chrome and when it comes to native versus web experience please feel free to do something else on my behalf whenever it means doing more of the things I care about and less time bikeshedding.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#83

Post by gjvc »

those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. watching the mother of all demos once a year is a sobering reminder of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

some better-than-most discussion here:

http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/04/from-the-vault...

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#84

Post by to3m »

amelius wrote: post #23

> Is it the web’s purpose to emulate native by inserting yet more features? Certainly not. In my opinion, the problem with the web is that it has become too complicated. In an effort to make the web simpler for the ordinary user, the web has actually become a more complicated place for the (advanced) developer. HTML, CSS and javascript have grown so complicated that they lack certain desirable properties, such as ver…

Lack of support for shared state is no disadvantage! When you write multithreaded programs in a language such as C++ or C#, you try to impose on yourself the same restriction, in the interests of making your life easier...

(I haven't used web workers, so maybe they're in fact awful to use. But from what I've read, it looks like the right decisions were made, pretty much.)

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#85

Post by the8472 »

fizk wrote: post #42

Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…

> Look at a site like YouTube today.

And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback.

Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer. There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them.

pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be somewhat broken (missing diagrams/images) or sometimes fails to render completely. native readers provide a better experience and better render times.

>And mimicking native can often lead to bad results. But to go from that and say that we shouldn’t try.

Maybe sometimes it would be better to provide better integration with native applications?

Native applications and browsers really don't like talking to each other.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#86

Post by webtards »

fizk wrote: post #42

Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…

The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post. It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data allowance get pissed away on a couple of bling websites. It can takes ages now for modern site to finally work as it downloads so much shite. Some big name sites used to render quicker five or ten years ago. At least in the past, you could turn off scripting, images and styling and get to the basic content, but not even that works now due to crap developers. It all sucks. Diseased turtles all the way down.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#87

Post by pjmlp »

jasode wrote: post #53
mozumder wrote: post #19

The web works best as a document platform. All the UI tricks that web developers work on all end up managing something related to just browsing/reading a document. It's amazing that modern browsers/HTML just don't have this basic user experience down. Why is it virtually impossible to read long articles on a web browser? After 25 years, why do web designers need to create their own page transition mechanics for long-…

>The web works best as a document platform. This is only true if you constrain the "web" to mean the Tim Berners-Lee document-centric HTML and its http hyperlinks. The "web" also means the whole internet stack, TCPIP, DNS routing, etc. In that case, the web is a foundational tool for anything that connects people or Internet Of Things. To say the "web works best as a document platform" is like saying "the electricity…

> ... TCPIP, DNS routing..

Also known as Ethernet protocols, nothing to do with "The Web".

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#88

Post by pavlov »

soft_dev_person wrote: post #63
pavlov wrote: post #28

I feel we’ve gone too far in emulating native apps. Conceding defeat will force us to rethink the web’s purpose and unique strengths — and that’s long overdue. This, a million times. Mobile websites and mobile apps have completely different strengths. The current trend is to develop them both with the same HTML-based toolchains and make them as similar as possible, which ends up being to the detriment of both. Users…

"With all that, the last 20% of a Cordova app may well take 80% of development time, and that's rarely been budgeted in." To be fair, that could be said about most software projects. "80% done, now the last 80% remains." Not that I disagree with you, I had the same experience trying to make an Android app in Phonegap. It's lacking, like most cross-platform frameworks (for most types of apps, but typically not games)…

To be fair, that could be said about most software projects.

Yes, absolutely true. The difference here is between "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", to paraphrase a certain renowned military strategist...

With Cordova/PhoneGap, it's easy to get the initial impression that you're dealing with "known unknowns", just the typical web development project pitfalls -- "This is HTML, I know this stuff".

When the "unknown unknowns" hit the fan, it's often pretty late in the development cycle, and so things blow past original estimates even though they were competently planned. It's just that the plan was for web development, not the shifting art of websites-in-drag-pretending-to-be-apps-development.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#89

Post by pjc50 »

jasode wrote: post #81
rimantas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the web means web. Internet means internet.

Those were the historical and technical divisions. Because http & https is ubiquitous and they have a defacto pass through most firewalls, the modern "web" is the "internet" as far as application interfaces are concerned. The idea of a pure separation of concepts such that http is "documents" and some other protocol on some other port is "apps" is not going to happen. All those IT departments' security teams and Cisc…

This is sadly true, but I think collapsing the distinction between "internet" and "web" is annoying and needlessly confusing.

Maybe things will be different in the IPv6 world.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#90

Post by robmcm »

shawnreilly wrote: post #39

It does not matter what platform you choose (web or mobile), bad developers develop bad software. For every horribly designed, slow, bloated website you find, you can likely find a similar horribly designed, slow, bloated native app. I'm sure you've heard of garbage in garbage out. I view development as a craft and like most crafts, not everyone has the same level of skill. This does not reflect on the platform peopl…

> bad developers develop bad software

I whish this phrase would die and be replaced by bad "teams" produce bad software. I have worked on some projects with fantastic developers, but awful or no UX, or a misguided vision, rushed to market etc etc.

I have also worked on projects with awful awful code base but the end product is actually alright (so long as it doesn’t need any maintenance).

Perhaps we should flip it on it's head and say, "good technology doesn't guarantee good software".

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